Archimedes Palimpsest
The Archimedes Palimpsest is a parchment codex palimpsest, which originally was a 10th-century Byzantine copy of an otherwise unknown work of Archimedes of Syracuse and other authors. It was overwritten with Christian religious text by 13th-century monks. The erasure was incomplete, and most of the text, still visible, was published by Johan Heiberg in 1915. The manuscript went missing in the early 20th century, and a forger added pictures to some of its pages to increase its value. The text under these forged pictures, as well as additional text previously unreadable, has been revealed by scientific and scholarly work from 1998 to 2008 on images produced by ultraviolet, infrared, visible and raking light, and X-ray. All images and scholarly transcriptions with metadata are now freely available on the web at the Digital Palimpsest, now hosted on OPenn and other web sites for free use under the Creative Commons License CC BY. The Biblical scholar Constantin von Tischendorf visited Constantinople in the 1840s, and, intrigued by the Greek mathematics visible on the palimpsest he found in a Greek Orthodox library, brought home a leaf of it (which is now in the Cambridge University Library.) In 1899 the Greek scholar Papadopoulos-Kerameus produced a catalog of the library's manuscripts and included a transcription of several lines of the partially visible underlying text. Upon seeing these lines Johan Heiberg, the world's authority on Archimedes, realized that the work was by Archimedes. When Heiberg studied the palimpsest in Constantinople in 1906, he confirmed that the palimpsest included works by Archimedes thought to have been lost. Heiberg was permitted by the Greek Orthodox Church to take careful photographs of the palimpsest's pages, and from these he produced transcriptions, published between 1910 and 1915 in a complete works of Archimedes. Shortly thereafter Archimedes' Greek text was translated into English by T. L. Heath. Before that it was not widely known among mathematicians, physicists or historians. The manuscript was still in the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem's library (the Metochion of the Holy Sepulchre) in Constantinople in 1920. Shortly thereafter, during a turbulent period for the Greek community in Turkey that saw a Turkish victory in the Greco-Turkish War (1919–22) along with the Greek genocide and the forced population exchange between Greece and Turkey, the palimpsest disappeared from the Greek church's library in Istanbul. Sometime between 1923 and 1930 the palimpsest was acquired by Marie Louis Sirieix, a "businessman and traveler to the Orient who lived in Paris." Though Sirieix claimed to have bought the manuscript from a monk, who would not in any case have had the authority to sell it, Sirieix had no receipt or documentation for a sale of the valuable manuscript. Stored secretly for years by Sirieix in his cellar, the palimpsest suffered damage from water and mold. In addition, after disappearing from the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate's library, a forger added copies of medieval evangelical portraits in gold leaf onto four pages in the book in order to increase its sales value, further damaging the text.9 These forged gold leaf portraits nearly obliterated the text underneath them, and x-ray fluorescence imaging at Stanford would later be required to reveal it. Sirieix died in 1956, and in 1970 his daughter began attempting quietly to sell the valuable manuscript. Unable to sell it privately, in 1998 she finally turned to Christie's to sell it in a public auction, risking an ownership dispute. The ownership of the palimpsest was immediately contested in federal court in New York in the case of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem v. Christie's, Inc. The Greek church contended that the palimpsest had been stolen from its library in Constantinople in the 1920s during a period of extreme persecution. Judge Kimba Wood decided in favor of Christie's Auction House on laches grounds, and the palimpsest was bought for $2 million by an anonymous buyer. Simon Finch, who represented the anonymous buyer, stated that the buyer was "a private American" who worked in "the high-tech industry", but was not Bill Gates The transcriptions of the book were digitally encoded using the Text Encoding Initiative guidelines, and metadata for the images and transcriptions included identification and cataloging information based on Dublin Core Metadata Elements. The metadata and data were managed by Doug Emery of Emery IT. On October 29, 2008, (the tenth anniversary of the purchase of the palimpsest at auction) all data, including images and transcriptions, were hosted on the Digital Palimpsest Web Page for free use under a Creative Commons License, and processed images of the palimpsest in original page order were posted as a Google Book. In late 2011, it was the subject of the Walters Art Museum exhibit "Lost and Found: The Secrets of Archimedes". In 2015, in an experiment into the preservation of digital data, Swiss scientists encoded text from the Archimedes Palimpsest into DNA More information, including the history and analysis of the document, on the Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes_palimpsest The Nova project page, with a timeline of the manuscript, is http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/inside-archimedes-palimpsest.html category:Palimpsests